Wow. So this is what it's like to lust after a Microsoft product. | Hacker News Reader

Wow. So this is what it's like to lust after a Microsoft product.

haythamalaa.blogspot.com

79 pointsmnemonicsloth43 comments

I tried. I tried really hard. I tried to gloss over the part about one of the panels hanging. I tried to not think about licensing terms or the hard cost. I stopped myself from wondering how responsive or open the dev team would be to user input. I purposefully didn't look up whoever the company was that actually developed the software before Microsoft took it over - and I tried not to assume that that was the case.

I'm exhausted.

Actually, I'm curious, who did they buy this from? I didn't see any indication that they did.

Also, you do have to give them some credit for using a blog with open comments for their communications channel. They do read those things, so they can listen there as an example. Some credit...OK, just a tiny bit of credit.

While M$ does buy up many companies, a lot of fascinating original research goes on there too and they have a huge research division. I'm not sure if this is completely related but you can take a look at some of these papers published by Paul Viola regarding research done at Microsoft on ink group recognition and content parsing.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/

(scroll down)

Dr. Paul Viola is also the guy created the first realtime face detector ( the one in openCV ).

Simon Peyton Jones (of Haskell/GHC fame) works for Microsoft Research, too.

As does Tony Hoare, apparently.

Generally the largest problem when MS buys a company or does interesting research is the transition into MS products. The various politics in the company force the the interesting tech to make compromises to utilize existing MS products. Often these compromises clearly make the tech less interesting from an outsider's prospective. The same thing happens at most(all?) large tech companies including Google.

This is a great idea along the lines of another thing I've wanted: OCR for math formulas when scanning documents or drawings (some really good computer science documents are out of print or are unavailable in a digital, searchable form).

I own a tablet and I think that Vista really shines there. The tablet input id amazingly well integrated and the overall user experience is great.

(I have the X61t, which I think is quite possibly the nicest piece of kit ever. Silly mac users will never understand ;))

How does tablet input feel like? You have to use a special stylys, don't you?

What is the CPU, is it LV or ULV and how is the battery life? This is the field where I find all of the existing notebooks lacking. I wish manufacturers have addressed this problem, at least used the existing ULV CPUs!

That said, I'm happy with my X60s, maybe it and the tablets are even the nicest pieces of kit ever, but they could have been made so much better!

What does battery life have to do with tablet inputs? Tablets (at least, the typical kind and not the kind with built-in screens like the Wacom Cintiq) use relatively little power (much less than, say, charging your phone via USB).

Different tablets use different technology. The Wacom tablets use an inductive charge (from the tablet itself) to charge a capacitor on the pen. This means that yes, you need a special stylus. However, because of it, you can get much more precise location and pressure readings. You also don't need to change any batteries in the stylus, as it's powered "over the air."

(I assume he was thinking tablet input => MS TabletPC)

Something like 95% of TabletPC's use a Wacom panel for the pen input, and those panels have similar characteristics to the Wacom consumer tablets and Cintiqs.

Well said; I work at Wacom, and I don't think I could have explained it better. :)

Powering the pen does consume some energy, but I believe the panels used for TabletPCs can actually be classified as "Low-Power" USB devices, so the drain isn't nearly as much as, say, the hard drive. I'm not sure how efficient the Windows Ink code is, but our driver, which hasn't taken extreme pains to be performant, peaks at about 3% of a 1GHz CPU when the pen is in range.

What does battery life have to do with tablet inputs?

Oh, nothing. There are two distinct questions of usability that I'm interested in. Except, that X60t tablet is different model form X60 laptop and may use different CPU and battery model, which of course impacts battery life.

Mine has both stylus and touch.

The touch is really so-so, but mostly because normal desktop UIs aren't so good with such a large "pointer".

I think you have your answer for power consumption, but I think my tablet is in the same general range as your X60s and probably there will be more variance depending on usage patterns. My two batteries lasted a full day of class using onenote and occasional hops on wifi to download notes, etc.

You have a spare battery that you swap, right?

Yes. I believe you can get a second battery in the drive bay, but that'd kind of hurt the whole portability aspect.

Win7 has some great new tablet features, too.

The real question is: can it do commutative diagrams?

These are the times when I wish that this technology was open-source (correct me I'm wrong), so if it was lacking, it could be added. I would love to have some similar way of turning commutative diagram sketches into TeX-ready form. It would save me hours of times fiddling with the current LaTeX packages.

Do we have two category theorists here, or has the unlikely happened and commutative diagrams found an application in the real world?

They are used fairly often in geometry and analysis. Other times should be used but are not (I assume due to authors who don't know much latex).

Regardless, I'm drooling over this. If only you didn't need to use MS word to make it work...

if you use pgf/tikz in latex, you can do commutative diagrams pretty easily in a matrix style environment where you then indicate how to draw arrows between various entries and such. It takes an hour or two of playing with to get a hang of the notation, but its pretty nice, despite its quirks

I had a tablet once. It's... the problem is that it's still a laptop computer. It's just not suited for being a digital notebook, whatever that's supposed to be.

It is simply not enough for there to be some parts of some applications geared towards tablet style interaction, the ENTIRE system needs to be built for it, and Windows with tablet input just wasn't.

I've had mostly the same experience. I can type much faster than I can write, so notetaking isn't much of a killer app.

However, the ability to add diagrams and sketches to my notes is REALLY nice. Things like this are really compelling: http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/cat_sketchnotes.htm... But the form factor and responsiveness aren't anywhere near a Moleskine.

If we could get a few more use cases for tables like this, maybe we'd see a combination trackpad-tablet input sometime in the future on some laptops? Or a secondary tablet input (as some particularly gigantic 2-screened monster laptops currently do).

Pen input is just so damn natural, but writing over a laptop screen is terrible. Useful ways to map tablet input onto parts of the screen (like this) would be a wonderful middle-ground.

Damn I could have used this in school ;) I can't even read my own math notiations ;(

I don't think I've ever seen ";(" before. I see a meme in our future... ;(

Edit: I'm honestly curious; is this a common emoticon? It seems simple enough that I should've seen it before.

It's fairly common -- less so than :) and ;), though. Usually it's a typo, but sometimes people use it for humor or satire about something negative.

> sometimes people use it for humor or satire about something negative.

Thanks, that makes sense. I guess I just haven't been on the right sites to see it.

Actually, I've got to correct myself a little -- looks like Skype uses it for crying:

http://www.skype.com/intl/en/allfeatures/emoticons/

That's strange, I thought crying should be :'-(

I guess the semicolon could be seen as having a tear coming from one eye, but it's too easy to confuse with a wink.

Agreed. I recently added emoticons to my startup -- ran into the same issue myself.

It's the Pop-Eye emoticon. ;( "I yams what I yams"

You are right. I knew the expression seemed familiar for some reason.

xThink's MathJournal(http://www.xthink.com/MathJournal.html) has been out for some time and has a very similar featureset.Unfortunately for them it looks like the 800lb gorilla strikes again.

This is cool.

TeX much ?

TeX doesn't do OCR at all, let alone for mathematical expressions. Regardless of who developed it, this is quite cool.

Edit: I wonder how much of this is straight up OCR and how much of it actually watches how the text is written. Could be some really interesting tech here.

Here you go. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630233

Hold on while I find the better link... Here you go: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/09/recognizing-impr...

I thought this second one was pretty interesting. An EMR company CEO on a forum I sometimes read enthusiastically pushes Win 7 over XP. Apparently it's _much_ better.

Interesting, thanks for the link.

There are converters to convert MathML into TeX (e.g. http://www.orcca.on.ca/MathML/texmml/mmltotex.html).

Mathematicians are artists. They don't want to type a bunch of obscure computer codes and then fiddle with them until they get something that looks pretty. Mathematicians want to dash their thoughts down before they flee with the dawn mist, and then move on to the next shattering lightning bolt of genius.

Actually, it's ok having something to do between the sparks of inspiration..

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